At eighteen, I went to West Point. I believed — the way driven, wounded young people often do — that if I could just become disciplined enough, strong enough, good enough, I would finally feel okay. I graduated with a degree in life sciences, a minor in nuclear engineering, and a commission as a second lieutenant in military intelligence. I deployed to Iraq. Then Afghanistan. From the outside, I was exactly what I had set out to become. Inside, I was exhausted, disconnected, and quietly desperate in ways I didn't yet have language for.

I knew how to endure. I didn't yet know how to listen to myself.

I got married two days after graduation. I had two boys I adored. I left active duty to raise them and discovered, with some surprise, that motherhood was the first thing in my life that felt completely right. I was born to be a mom. Those early years — the swim lessons, the park walks, the preschool volunteering — were some of the happiest of my life.

But underneath, something was unraveling. My marriage was slowly coming apart. My husband is a high-functioning alcoholic, and for years I stayed — trying therapy, patience, understanding, and repair. I stayed until I couldn't anymore. Until the cost of staying became greater than the terror of leaving.

We separated in the spring of 2019. I was forty years old. I had been married for fifteen years. I did not want a divorce. And I had absolutely no idea who I was outside of being a wife and a mother and a soldier.

That was the beginning of everything.

A few weeks after our separation, I walked into my first hot yoga class. The teacher said something about chakras — about how people had known about the energy centers of the body, their colors and sounds, thousands of years before any medical equipment existed. I had no idea what she was talking about. But something in me woke up. My soul, for lack of a better word, perked up and wanted to know everything.

I had been raised Christian. At fifteen I became an atheist. For twenty-five years I was quietly, desperately searching for something I couldn't name — a connection to something larger than myself, a spiritual home that felt true rather than inherited. I had been depressed for most of my adult life and had always suspected, somewhere deep down, that the depression wasn't the real problem. That it was covering something. That antidepressants would only ever treat the symptom, not the root.

I found God — or God found me — in a yoga studio, near the end of my teacher training. I hadn't gone to the training to become a teacher. I went because I needed to understand what was happening to me. What I found was more than I could have imagined.

I threw myself into healing. I went back to school, thinking I would become a nurse. I lasted two semesters. One morning, driving to clinicals in tears — hating the pharmacology, the rigidness, the fluorescent-lit hospitals that felt like the opposite of everything I was learning in yoga — I said out loud to the universe: but I have to do this.

And I heard, clearly and quietly: no you don't.

I quit the following Monday.

I became a health coach, then a yoga teacher, then a certified intuitive eating counselor. I trained in psychic abilities and interfaith ministry. I became an ordained minister. I ran programs and retreats and groups. I kept accumulating credentials, partly because I genuinely wanted to learn — and partly, I now understand, because I was hoping the right title would finally make me feel legitimate enough to show up fully.

What actually changed everything was working with a somatic experiencing practitioner named David. For the first time, I wasn't just understanding my story intellectually. I was feeling how it lived in my body. I could sense the places where I had contracted, adapted, armored, survived. And slowly — not through effort or willpower, but through presence and being deeply met — those places began to soften.

That experience is why I do this work.

I am now training as a Hakomi practitioner — a somatic, mindfulness-based approach that I believe is some of the most profound healing work available. I hold a 500-hour yoga teacher certification, training as an intuitive eating counselor, an interfaith ministry ordination, and years of my own ongoing somatic work. But the most important part of my training has been my own life — the divorce, the awakening, the depression I walked through without medication, the body I spent decades fighting and have finally, imperfectly, come home to.

I am also a single mother to two teenage boys. I strength train. I paddle board. I take my shoes off and stand in the grass. I have danced alone in my living room at all hours of the day. I am still learning. I am still listening.

What I Believe

I believe our relationship to our own body is the most sacred relationship we have.

I believe rising above the body is not enlightenment — it is spiritual bypassing. And it can be dangerous. Some of the most harmful people in spiritual leadership have been those most disconnected from their bodies.

I believe our emotions, our sensations, our longings are not obstacles to spiritual growth. They are the path.

To live the fullest expression of your soul in this lifetime, you must come home to your body. Not fix it. Not transcend it. Inhabit it.

Nothing about you needs to be fixed. You are already whole. Healing is the work of getting acquainted with the parts that have been discarded, weakened, shamed, or locked away in the shadows — and gently, lovingly integrating them back.

We are not here to become free-floating souls. We chose to be here, in these bodies, in this lifetime — to feel, to experience, to heal the patterns living in our bloodlines so we can pass more love and freedom and joy to those who come after us.

True healing is not over-effort or over-achieving. It is knowing yourself. Accepting yourself. Loving yourself.

Your body already knows. It has been waiting for you to listen.

My Training & Background

• Bachelor of Science, United States Military Academy (West Point)

• E-RYT 500 Yoga Teacher

• Certified Integrative Nutrition Health Coach

• Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor

• Ordained Interfaith Minister

• Church of the Wild Leadership certificate

• Hakomi Practitioner (Level 1 graduate, Level 2 in progress)

• Ongoing training in somatic, embodied, and earth-based practices

Credentials matter. Presence matters more. The most important part of my training has been my own ongoing commitment to self-compassion. somatic awareness, self-inquiry, and integration.